For Chris Pappan, distinguishing between the past and present, the present and the future, is irrelevant. Time, for him, is circular and cyclical, something that ensures he’s able to connect to those who came before him and also to those who will after.

A citizen of the Kaw (Kanza) Nation and of Osage, Lakota, and European descent, Pappan (previously) is invested in honoring his ancestors while emphasizing Native American contemporaneity. He often works on municipal ledger paper and other found substrates to depict people in photorealistic detail, mirroring their faces and forms and creating myriad metaphors for split selves, distortion, and human interaction that transcend time and space.

I spoke with Pappan after the opening of At the Precipice: Responses to the Climate Crisis, which includes the artist’s meticulous triptych of two figures, “Howageji Nizhuje Akipé (Where the Rivers Meet).” Configured as a “Y” shape to reflect the Chicago River, the works are exemplary of Pappan’s painstaking devotion to rendering the most minute details and to showing how actions of the past continue to affect the present. In this conversation, we discuss his evolution as an artist, the complexity of Indigenous life in Chicago, and the importance of his new collaborative venture, the Center for Native Futures.

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Grace Ebert: I want to start with your background. You grew up in Flagstaff. How does that inform your understanding of yourself and your work?

Chris Pappan: As far as my work is concerned and my practice, I’ve always been drawing. I graduated from high school in Flagstaff, and my last year there, I was in two art classes and constantly drawing in all my other classes, like English and math. I always got the work done, and the teachers were pretty chill with it. I passed. I wasn’t getting As or anything, but they could see where I was going.

Grace: And your grandmother encouraged you. Is that right?

Chris: Yeah. When I was younger, she was always telling me about how artistic my mom is and told me, “You’re probably artistic, too.” At that age, you’re just like, “Yeah, I guess. I don’t know. Whatever.” But she kept at it and then passed away while I was still in junior high. Her words always stuck with me. Once I started really developing more of a practice and getting out there, then I thought it was important to honor her through art.

Our people believe that our ancestors are always with us and watching over us. I think that’s very important. In a lot of my work, I try to honor our ancestors in that way. I’m always looking at old photographs, and I feel like I’m communicating directly with them. Whether they’re my direct ancestors or indirect ancestors, that’s really special.

Grace: How do you think about your work in the broader tradition of your ancestors and their art practices?

Chris: When I graduated from the Institute of American Indian Arts, I wasn’t really quite sure where I wanted to go with my work. While I was there, in Santa Fe, I was trying really hard to not get put into this Native American art pigeonhole. Growing up in the Southwest, you see it all the time. You see successful artists conforming to certain modes of expression and a certain visual language that is supposed to express our culture, but I feel the homogenization creates a “pan-Indian-ness” and reinforces a mono-culture, which is still true today. But nowadays, there’s more acceptance of different modes of expressing our culture and who we are and our own experiences.

Circling back to my time in Santa Fe, I was trying to stay away from that. The importance of my time there was more about connecting with other Native students and learning about that side of my culture and my identity because I didn’t really grow up with it. It was really important for me to connect with other people, other artists, and young artists, who have had similar experiences as me. That was more important for me than trying to develop my visual language.

Then I came to Chicago with [my wife] Debra and went to the School of the Art Institute. I couldn’t continue my education there, and then thought I could develop my practice/business on my own. I ended up getting a job working for an art gallery here in Chicago, and that’s when I started to do the ledger drawings. To me, that was a direct correlation between my work and influences and ancestral art or a traditional art form. I saw this as an opportunity to adapt and possibly change it, which I think I have been successful in doing.

That’s my connection to the ancestral artwork. I don’t want it to stay in the past. It’s about the present and the future, as well. It’s not one-sided or linear. It’s circular or cyclical, more about our experiences as Native people today, how that’s informed by the past, and how it can be in the future.

Grace: How does this understanding of time inform your work?

Chris: Looking at historical portrait photography, I’m putting myself in that moment. The photograph was capturing a single moment in time, which was the present then. I’m bringing that presence into today. With these artworks, being in a frame in a museum somewhere, they’re preserved for the future. Hopefully, my descendants and other folks will be able to see my work and go back through those layers of time again.

For me, it’s all about those different layers. When I’m creating these works, I’m putting down different layers. I’m starting with the substrate, the ledger paper, and then building on top of that. I’m thinking about what other layers will be added to it later on, whether it’s people looking at it or whether it’s put in a book and going somewhere else.

Grace: Where do you source your photos?

Chris: Wherever I can find them. There have been a number of books published of photographs of Native Americans. The good side is that they’re preserving that moment in time and actually documenting these peoples’ lives in that moment. But the bad side of it also is the manipulation of those images and using them as propaganda to perpetuate ideas of the “savage warrior” or the “vanishing race,” that sort of thing.

There’s a book that was published by the Smithsonian that collected photos documenting the times Native American tribes went to Washington, D.C. There were delegations to fight for land rights or to cede land. The government made an effort to take portraits of everyone that was coming to do business. There’s this thick book of all these portraits of people that came through Washington, D.C., and there’s an illustration that documented this photographic process: There’s somebody sitting in the chair with the screen behind them, and everybody else is looking at him. Watching that whole process, it’s really interesting.

Unfortunately, a lot of the photographs in the book are really small, so they’re hard to work from as a visual resource, but it’s still really interesting to see. The amount of people that came through is amazing.

Grace: And then I’m sure there’s also the element of looking at those photos and thinking about the agreements that probably came out of those meetings that were not honored.

Chris: Exactly. I think about those agreements that were broken and the surrender of all this land. The entire state of Oklahoma was supposed to be Indian territory, and then non-Natives still moved in, displacing thousands.

Grace: The work that you’ve made for At the Precipice talks about the connection between land and people. Who are the figures in these pieces?

Chris: I came across the photo of the Sac and Fox man who becomes the North Branch of the Chicago River in the work, and he is unnamed in the photograph. It made me think about another project I was working on for a group on the East Coast. They wanted a portrait of one of their leaders who has gone unnamed throughout history. I don’t know if either she decided on her own anonymity or if because she was a woman, she didn’t need to be named. There’s a power in that: our people decided that they could keep their identity to themselves and not have it distorted throughout time.

He’s Sac and Fox, and the other man is named White Eagle. He’s Ponca. Their photos were taken while they were in Indian territory. The Sac and Fox were originally from this area and were eventually moved down to Indian territory. Those photographs came from the collection of the Huntington Library in Pasadena.

These photographs speak to me sometimes, whether the way that people look, the way they’re standing, what they’re wearing. It really affects how I feel about the photograph and will make me want to draw them. I see the textures that I think would be really fun to draw or if there’s a direct correlation with a show I’m working on. The Sac and Fox person was displaced from Chicago so I thought it would be good to bring him back home.

I was thinking about sharing him on social media to see if anyone recognized him, but maybe he doesn’t want his name known. So I think I’ll just honor that.

Grace: Many of your works featured mirrored figures or split figures. How does that process work? In “Howageji Nizhuje Akipé (Where the Rivers Meet),” you draw full faces and then replicate differently sized portions of that same face.

Chris: That’s something that I’ve just started to do in my work. I was inspired by another Native artist. She has this whole scene in her mind and then she’ll repeat it in portions so it creates this vast landscape. And I was really inspired by that. For me, it’s an entirely different way to distort figures, which is something I’ve been intentional about in my work for a long time.

A number of years ago when I first started doing these ledger drawings, I saw a lot of people working from old photographs: “Here’s a painting of Geronimo and Sitting Bull.” That sort of thing. It’s very familiar to people, and I liked that but I wanted to think about how I could approach it differently.

It started out with mirroring, which was a complete accident. I was tracing the outline of a photograph and transferred it to the ledger paper. I did it backward from how I intended, and thought, “Oh, man, I messed this up,” and then I was like, “Oh, wait, what if I just do another one right next to it? Or on top?” And I realized that this is weird, this is cool, and I really liked it. It was one of those happy accidents, a Bob Ross moment.

But getting serious about it and putting it into a Native artwork context, it becomes this whole other thing about identity issues or traveling through time.

With this exhibition, I just went crazy, I guess. Even with the mirroring and the overlay, as it is in the bottom drawing [Sac and Fox man], your perception of the figure becomes different. You’re perceiving something else. You said it’s different sizes, but it’s not. It’s basically taking one section and then repeating it, then the next section and repeating it. It’s very manipulated but organic at the same time in how it comes together and breaks apart and comes together. I think it’s analogous to how human beings are reacting to each other. We come together and then break apart, throughout history, throughout our lives.

It can also be a metaphor for breaking Chicago up into a grid and how our lives interact in this grid. That’s all part of colonization, establishing the city, making it into a grid, and dividing it all up but still having this identity as one city. The river runs through the middle of it, which speaks to how humans have interacted, then destroyed the environment and are now trying to rectify the sins of the past.

My work is taking that stereotype and flipping it around, distorting it to show that that’s not who we are. It is not only who we are.

Chris Pappan

Grace: I’m just realizing that when I look at your works, my eyes go immediately to the full faces. I feel like there’s some metaphor there about recognizing a face or the difficulty of looking at distortion.

Chris: Yeah, that makes sense, seeing something that you recognize rather than seeing what’s there.

That’s also interesting because somebody at the opening of At the Precipice was saying that his eye goes directly to that third eye right in the center. That’s what I love. People perceive it in different ways. There’s this weird, abstract thing that happens, and people will see things that I didn’t intend. But, again, it all speaks to that distorted view, that image of us that’s been manipulated over time for a certain agenda. And Native people also perpetuate that, as well.

I wanted to stay away from Native art when I was at school because of falling into those tropes and perpetuating those stereotypes. My work is taking that stereotype and flipping it around, distorting it to show that that’s not who we are. It is not only who we are.

Grace: That reminds me of the exhibition that you did for the Field Museum a few years ago, which was a corrective. As you reflect on that show at this point, how do you feel about it?

Chris: As far as my contribution to the Field Museum, I feel good about what I did. But unfortunately, I don’t feel like it’s made a lasting change. They thankfully saw that there was a need to take out the old exhibit hall and redo it. That’s good. There were positive changes made, but unfortunately, it was only a superficial change. That place needs some deep institutional change and rectification that is not happening. Now it feels like they’re doubling down and reinforcing what the old exhibit hall was perpetuating: Natives only exist in the past, and all of our culture is up for grabs. I know they feel they went too far in community collaboration with this new exhibition [in that the institution has no voice], and so they’re trying to take it back to what it used to be because they don’t trust people to be the experts of their own culture.

Honestly, there was hesitation and reluctance to show my work there, but I felt that my work could be a positive change. I learned a lot from that. I learned a lot about how people perceive Native people and why they perceive that. It’s because of what [people at the institution] have said and what they haven’t said about us, and what they choose to show about us ]spiritual and sacred objects]. Would I do it again? Probably not.

Sometimes you have to do these things and find out. A lot of people were like, “Are you sure you want to do that? That’s very brave of you.” At the time, I’ll admit, I was a bit naive, not really having a museum background or fully understanding the depths of the issues there. I felt like I could do some good there, and I did, but now, there’s a lot of pushback. I don’t understand why they can’t just move forward and why they have to entrench themselves in these old ideas.

Grace: Chicago is such an interesting city. I always think of us as being progressive, and there are changes, like the Chicago Monuments Project. And yet, at the same time, we have the Blackhawks.

Chris: Right. Toward the end of my exhibition there, the Board of Trustees at the Field Museum elected the owner of the Chicago Blackhawks to be their board president.

A guest curator of another exhibition there then became good friends with the owner’s son, who was running the Blackhawks Foundation. So then you had this Native American trying to champion the Blackhawks Foundation and “all the good” that they’re doing for Native people. And we were like, “What are you doing? This is insane.” There are people here who are trying to get the name changed for so long. But this is the M.O. of an organization with a racist mascot: Once they see any opposition coming, they’ll throw tons of money at it and hope goes away. It’s even better for them if they can get Native people on board to say: “I’m Native, and I’m okay with this.”

But who really benefits from that? It’s only a handful of people, and it doesn’t benefit the community. The team has tried to “educate” the team’s fans by having information booths at the games and bringing Native veterans out on the ice for every home game. It’s a sad show. It’s sad to see Native people used that way. Then the fans will say: “The Blackhawk tribe is okay with this.” There is no Blackhawk tribe.

Grace: It’s all so empty.

Chris: When you walk by the store on Michigan Avenue, it says “the best uniform in the NHL.” I’m like, holy hell man!

Grace: This feels like a good time to talk about what you’re doing with the Center for Native Futures. How did you decide that that was something you wanted to do?

Chris: Yeah. It’s been many years of dreaming. Debra and I wanted to start our own gallery here in Chicago a long time ago. Any Native American art representation was either very stereotypical [Field Museum] or very rarely, if ever, at the MCA and Art Institute. But we didn’t know how to start a business. You need a lot of money to buy a storefront and get a business running. This was at the time when I was working at the art gallery downtown, so I was still learning the business and how to be a full-time artist.

Debra started volunteering at the Field Museum because of my exhibition and doing community engagement. The museum received funding that stipulated community engagement as a full-time position, so they got the grant and brought her on to do that. We still had the dream but had to put it on the back burner. I then got laid off from my job at the art gallery, but it was a really smooth transition into doing art full-time.

And then the pandemic happened. We brought a couple of other friends into this idea of starting a gallery here. Artist Andrea Carlson then brought it up to the previous director of the American Indian Center, who started a 501(c)(3) for us. We were doing everything online, and we were also doing a lot of consulting for organizations. It just really grew and grew and grew to now. A big turning point for us was the Terra Foundation giving us seed funding because they loved the idea of what we’re doing and saw the importance of our mission. It was like, oh, this is really happening now! Here’s the money we need to start.

We were also consulting with the MacArthur Foundation, which owns the Marquette Building. Going back to Chicago and its difficulty and weirdness with Native American representation, the lobby of the Marquette Building features these amazing Tiffany murals. I wish that the subject matter was different, but it’s a perfect example of cognitive dissonance. You’re looking at this really beautifully done mural, but the imagery is like I’m watching Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves.

The foundation wanted to do some sort of intervention with that. There’s this causeway in between the Marquette Building and the building next to it that had this little exhibit about architecture. That has since been taken out, and they are installing an exhibition about Native Americans from the area that reimagines the busts that are also in the building of Native leaders. I contributed to that in reimagining those busts as drawings. The foundation also had all this empty storefront space due to the pandemic and asked if we would be interested in using that space, which then helps to counteract that narrative that the murals are telling.

Grace: And now that you have that space, what do you have planned?

Chris: We are shooting for our grand opening on September 16 and 17, 2023. We will have a large group show with many of the artists that we’ve been working with, up until now.

It’s good that we’ve been dreaming about this for a long time because going out into the Native American art world and meeting all these great artists and wanting to bring them to Chicago, we’re able to do that now. We easily have ten years of programming that we can do. It’s just making sure that we have the money and the time to do it.

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Pappan’s “Howageji Nizhuje Akipé (Where the Rivers Meet)” is on view in At the Precipice through October 30 at the Design Museum of Chicago. Find more of his work on his site and Instagram.